Hellen
Lee-Keller is
Assistant Professor of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the English
Department at California State University, Sacramento. She
is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Ethnic
Literature.
Her current research examines the ways in which late nineteenth-century
narratives of upward economic and social mobility minimized
and concealed racial, class, sexual, and gender struggles
within the diverse transnational contexts of two major U.S.
port cities: San Francisco and New Orleans.

Underneath
the macabre veneer
of "The Haunted Valley" lies Bierce’s
radical politics that condemn the U.S. nation-building project
built upon hypocritical Christian charity, racist
ideologies of
white superiority,
and virulent anti-immigrant nativism.

Bierce
uses this triangulated relationship among the two white men and
Ah Wee to represent the ways in which white men projected their
fears and anxieties regarding politics and labor onto Chinese immigrants.

Bierce
shows us how racism and patriarchy are intertwined with religious
chauvinism as a means to disguise the exploitation
of racialized women's labor.

Bierce
teases his readers by, on the one hand, portraying Dunfer and Gopher
as not sexually drawn to or involved with a Chinese immigrant man,
but a Chinese immigrant woman. Yet, on the other
hand, Bierce never actually clears up the mystery.

CIVILIZING
VIOLENCE: "THE HAUNTED VALLEY"

FEATURING
AN AX-MURDER and a transgendered love-triangle, Ambrose Bierce
in his short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871)
launches a searing critique of the anti-Chinese sentiment circulating
in California and across the U.S. during the mid- to late-nineteenth
century. Complete with glittering eyes peering through knotholes,
eerie and foreboding valleys, and disarmingly-lucid insane
characters, Bierce's first published short story reads
at a quick glance as though it were simply a ghostly tale. Yet,
underneath the macabre veneer lies Bierce’s radical politics
that condemn the U.S. nation-building project built upon hypocritical
Christian charity, racist ideologies of white superiority,
and virulent anti-immigrant nativism. Even though in
his fiction Bierce was unable to escape entirely the prevailing
influence of racist politics and religious chauvinism of his
period, he nevertheless recognized and unequivocally
criticized the contradictions of a civilizing mission that,
among other things, purported to tame the wilderness of the
western frontier. Through the story’s focus on a Janus-faced
white politician’s
obsession with—and murder of—a Chinese immigrant worker,
Bierce makes clear that the discourse of "civilization" often
disguised the violent subordination of feminized and racialized
immigrant workers.

Bierce grounds the story with references to the highly-charged
anti-Chinese sentiment alive during the period. For example,
even though the story is ostensibly about three white men—a
nameless narrator acting as the redactor of the recollections
of Whiskey Jo. Dunfer, a local politician/saloonkeeper, and
Gopher, Dunfer’s employee—the story itself hinges
upon the one character who never speaks, has been murdered,
and with whom all three are obsessed: the Chinese immigrant
figure, Ah Wee. Bierce consistently interweaves a critique
of the growing anti-Chinese discourse that was gaining legitimacy
through the relentless attacks of journalists such as Henry
George and through the reincarnation of the Workingman's
Party in the mid-1870s under the stewardship of Irish immigrant
and labor rabble-rouser Dennis Kearney. [1]

Because the murder-love story is complex, I here provide a
detailed summary. The narrator tells the story in halves,
based on two separate encounters that are spaced four years
apart. Peppered with Dunfer’s local-color dialect
as well as the narrator’s own descriptions full of menace
and mystery, the story partially unfolds in Dunfer’s
saloon. From the start, Dunfer clearly displays his animosity
toward Chinese immigrants as he expounds to the narrator his
antipathy for the "infernal yeller devils" (89)
and "Chinagration," Chinese immigration (88). [2] Further,
Dunfer intimates that he killed Ah Wee, whom he describes
as "that
miser'ble, pig-tail Mongolianer," because Ah Wee
persisted in "hewin' away at the saplin's
all round the stems, girdleways" rather than "on
two sides, so’s to make ‘em fall right" (89). In
fear of Dunfer's fury at this vivid recollection of improperly
felled trees, the narrator immediately takes his leave. In
the following scene, punctuating the middle of the tale, the
narrator stumbles his way into a shadowy ravine, entombed with
a "death chamber hush" (90). In the midst
of the valley, he finds the trees "hacked all round,
in a most unwoodsman-like manner" (91) and nearby he
discovers a well-tended grave, adorned with garden violets,
and a rough-hewn tombstone that reads:

AH
WEE—CHINAMAN
Aig unnone. Wirkt last for Wisky Jo.
This monment is ewrecked bi the saim to keep is menmerry grean
an liquize a wornin to Slestials notter to take on ayres like Wites. Dammum! She wus
a good eg. (91, emphasis added) [3]

Even
though the narrator claims not to be surprised to find the
grave itself, he is puzzled by "the ludicrous transition
of gender and sentiment" (91) on the stone. In the
end, the narrator decides to ignore the mysterious fluidity of
gender pronouns on the tombstone because finding out the truth
might be "a pitiful anti-climax" (91) and quits the
valley and the region altogether. It is only years later, when
the narrator returns to the valley, that he learns from Gopher
about the love triangle. As the tombstone indicated, Ah
Wee was not, in fact, a he, but rather a she,
and Dunfer killed Ah Wee in a fit of jealous rage thinking that
Ah Wee and Gopher were involved in a sexual relationship. Ultimately,
Dunfer, who had fallen in love with Ah Wee over the years, fell
into despair when he realized what he had done, started drinking
heavily again, and grew even more anti-Chinese.

Bierce
uses this triangulated relationship among the two white men
and Ah Wee to represent the ways in which white men projected
their fears and anxieties regarding politics and labor onto
Chinese immigrants. For example, Bierce's criticism
of a race-baiting political agenda that manipulates Christian
chauvinism appears through a soliloquy by Dunfer, locally known
as a "very important personage in those parts" (88). Bierce
untangles the unholy trinity of religious, racist, and rhetorical
underpinnings of early California politics when Dunfer says:

I
didn't pan out well, them days: drank more'n wus
good fur me, and hadn't no nice discriminatin' sense
of my duty as a free W'ite citizen; so I got this pagan
as a kind of cook, and turned off a Mexican woman—as
nice a Greaser as ye ever seen. But when I got religi'n,
over at the Hill, and they talked of runnin' me fur the
Legislater, my eyes wus opened. But what wus I to do?
If I made him sling his kit and mosey, somebody else'd
take him, and mightn't treat him well. What was
I to do? What'd any Christian do, 'specially one
new to the business? (89, emphasis original) [4]

By
illustrating that Dunfer's understanding that the proper
behavior of a "free, W'ite citizen" was based
on a religious awakening, tied to advancing a political career,
Bierce highlights the internal contradictions—charity vis á vis chauvinism—of
calling upon Christian values in labor politics. On the
one hand, Dunfer's religious conversion makes clear that
close contact with "pagans" is morally wrong, thus
highlighting fears of contagion that permeated anti-Chinese
sentiment and politics from the early 1850s—such as in
the racist and inflammatory labor-organizing speeches of Kearney
or the equally race-baiting economic jeremiads of George. [5] On
the other hand, if Dunfer fires Ah Wee, he fears that "somebody
else'd take him, and mightn't treat him well." Dunfer's
fear is not merely based in grandiosity, that no one would
treat the Chinese servant as well as he does; it also suggests
Bierce's awareness of the violent hostilities aimed at
Chinese immigrants. Not only were Chinese immigrants
run off their mining claims by European immigrants and native-born
whites, they were also blamed as the cause for the recessions
of the 1860s. By the time "The Haunted Valley" appeared
in print, white workers were unfairly displacing their justifiable
anger toward growing monopolies onto racialized others, specifically
the Chinese. This anger translated into action and, in turn,
influenced local and national legislation being passed to restrict
the immigration of Chinese laborers. By 1870, three
municipal and state laws were passed in California specifically
targeting the Chinese working population, especially women. [6] By
1882, three federal laws would be passed that equally restricted
or limited Chinese workers from entering the country. [7]

Chinese immigrant men and women were not the only ones onto whom
the fears of white men and European immigrants would be displaced;
as Bierce alludes to, in depicting the two cooks as Chinese and
Mexican women, racialized women from many backgrounds suffered
the brunt of labor politics that traded on racism and religious
chauvinism. Many women regardless of race or national origin
during the first few decades of statehood in California found
it difficult to find employment outside of sex work. Since
traditionally "feminine" labor, such as cooking,
was performed by white men and laundering was often undertaken
by Chinese immigrant men, women were generally left to scramble
for the few jobs left. Some women were able to carve out a niche
within this high-pressure economy by teaching grade school, running
boarding houses, and some even by marrying. A number of women,
however, worked in the extra-legal economy in brothels,
either as sex workers or as service workers (i.e. cooks, launderers,
housekeepers, etc.).

If white women found it difficult to secure any work, racialized
women found the situation even more dire. It is no accident
that Dunfer's female cooks are a "Greaser," then
a "pagan." [8] Bierce would have been well
aware that many whites were contemptuous of Mexican and Chinese
women and consequently they would have only been able to find
employment as cooks in the most morally dubious establishments,
such as Dunfer's saloon. In the facile exchange of
one racialized woman for another, Bierce illustrates the ways
in which notions of whiteness and gender normativity were interrelated
and alternately emphasized racial or ethnic particularities at
certain moments—"Greaser" as opposed to "pagan"—but
downplayed them at others as one racialized woman is easily substituted
for the other. Further, by juxtaposing an epithet focusing
on race with one on religion, Bierce points out how racism and
religious chauvinism are interconnected. For example, even though
Dunfer proclaims that his first Mexican cook was "nice" and
that Ah Wee needs protection, which can be read as different
permutations of docility and subordination, the two women would
never be able to attain True Womanhood because of the insurmountable
obstacles of racial and ethnic difference. Ah Wee's path
to True Womanhood is foreclosed because she is a pagan; as such,
she is outside the parameters of Christian charity and piety. The
Mexican woman, with her Latin roots, would also be disqualified
since she would probably be Catholic, which in the minds of many
Protestants was the near equivalent to idol-worshipping pagans. [9]

If the juxtaposition of the terms "Greaser" and "pagan" are
symbolic of the ways in which racialized women are demeaned as
objects of ethnic or religious contempt, then Bierce also shows
us how racism and patriarchy are intertwined with religious chauvinism
as a politically expedient means to disguise the exploitation
of racialized women's labor. Even though Dunfer invokes
Christian charity by taking in Ah Wee for fear that someone else
might mistreat him, this so-called charity actually provided
Dunfer with very cheap, if not free, labor. Dunfer's reduction
of the two racialized women to mere epithets—"pagan"
and "Greaser"— might
be interpreted as Bierce's criticism of the hypocrisy of
a standard of Christian charity. By emphasizing Dunfer's
bigotry in one breath and that Dunfer "got religion" as
a means to forward a political career in another, Bierce exposes
the ethnocentrism of Christianity that refuses to recognize the
individuality or even the humanity of non-white women since one
racialized working woman is so easily traded for another. Ultimately,
Ah Wee's death acts as a symbolic removal of Chinese immigrant
women from the U.S. entirely. The removal, however, was
not only symbolic, for within five years of the publication of
the story, there would be exceedingly little tolerance for Chinese
immigrant women in white US-American society; in 1875 Congress
ratified the Page Law. [10] In
short, Bierce points out that political expediency outweighs
any sense of integrity, racist or not.

Bierce's scorn at the hypocrisy and fluidity of political
expediency is also apparent in his handling of Ah Wee's
gender ambiguity. Rather than settling on a solely masculine
reading of Ah Wee's gender, I suggest that Bierce's
purposeful use of the pronoun "he" in Dunfer's
account of the story and "she" in Gopher's
allows for multiple readings. That is, Asian Americans are frequently
doubly disenfranchised as falling short in terms of fulfilling
normative gender and class roles. [11] This double disenfranchisement,
both gendered and classed, is what makes Ah Wee's gender
indecipherable. Ah Wee is legible as a man because Chinese working-class
immigrant men were often seen as feminized through their association
with domestic labor, and because Chinese immigrant women were
purportedly hyper-sexual. Given this logic, on the one
hand, if Ah Wee did not exude sexuality then she could be perceived
as de-feminized since she would fail to perform her prescribed
role as seductress. Yet, on the other hand, Chinese men who performed
domestic work were seen as de-masculinized; that is, Chinese
men were not necessarily always feminized, but at times rendered
gender neutral. Thus, the combination of designating Chinese
immigrants as inherently deviant and illegible in terms of normative
gender and sexuality allows for the gender masquerade, where
men can pass for women, and women for men.

Accordingly, the obsession with the perceived sexual deviancy
of Chinese immigrants, registered in the story as gender fluidity,
allowed white U.S.-Americans to avoid confronting homosociality
as well as homosexuality. [12] Thus, the civilizing project
here is not only to tame the deviant and disobedient Ah Wee,
but also to domesticate Ah Wee’s perceived gender and sexual
deviancy. This domestication of deviancy is a heteronormative
imperative since, as Bierce illustrates, the feminization of
Chinese immigrant men creates a situation where white masculinity
can express its homosexual desire. At the very opening
of the story, the narrator foreshadows this desire by describing
Dunfer's abode as a "hermaphrodite habitation" (88).
While this ambiguity of this structure is immediately clarified
as "half residence and half groggery" (88)—his
home is neither a residence nor business, but both—Bierce's
choice of the term "hermaphrodite" stresses the incarnation
of multiple sexualities within a single body and suggests multiple
sexual desires of that body. This multiplicity of this desire
is echoed and contained in Dunfer's final iteration of
the feminine pronoun "she" on the tombstone that,
then, operates as a domesticating device by circumscribing Dunfer's
and Gopher's desire as heteronormative. Bierce teases
his readers by, on the one hand, portraying Dunfer and Gopher
as not sexually drawn to or involved with a Chinese immigrant man,
but a Chinese immigrant woman. Yet, on the other
hand, Bierce never actually clears up the mystery, thus the possibility
remains. In this way, Bierce underscores the potentially
paradoxical outcomes of the civilizing project; specific civilizing
discourses of racial hierarchies at times undermine the discourses
of heteronormativity.

In closing, I am not trying to depict Bierce's politics
anachronistically as I call attention to the radical nature of
his politics. Indeed, even in his critique, Bierce at times
perpetuates the myths he contests. By focusing on the gender
ambiguity, he offers a sympathetic view of the Chinese immigrant
woman and yet he still depicts her as a servant caught in a compromising
sexual situation. The narrator, Dunfer, and Gopher all
accept that she is a servant without question, therefore inviting
the reader to do the same. Further, not one of them shows
any qualms that she ended up in Dunfer's employ because
she had been reduced to a commodity; as the story explains, she
had been traded in a poker game. The general composure
regarding Ah Wee being reduced to the stakes that can be gambled
away overshadows the conditions leading to the increasing numbers
of Chinese immigrant women available for purchase, sale, or exchange. Nevertheless,
despite Bierce's moments of falling prey to racist and
sexist stereotypes, I do not want to diminish the degree to which
Bierce's politics were contextually radical. In this
sense, "The Haunted Valley" calls attention to the
fact that radical politics have always existed in U.S. history,
condemning the inequalities posed by bigotry regarding racial,
gendered, and national differences.

NOTES

I am grateful to Jake Mattox and Gabriela Nuñez
for their assiduous readings and conscientious suggestions.
I also thank Shelley Streeby for her careful guidance and
mentoring over the years. And, finally, I thank the anonymous
reader for a few key comments that helped strengthen and
nuance my argument.

1. For
an example of the negative press, see Henry George, "The
Chinese in California," Racism, Dissent, and Asian
Americans from 1850 to Present: A Documentary History,
eds. Philip S. Foner and Daniel Rosenberg (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1869), 84-87.

2.All
further citations will be from the original version, Ambrose
Bierce, "The Haunted Valley," Overland Monthly 7.1
(1871): 88-95. While Bierce would later make changes to the story
when he revised and reworked the body of his writings for his Collected
Works (1909-1912), I cite from the original version of the
story because his later edits would excise crucial phrases and
passages that explicitly represent and reproduce the social tensions
of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic California during the late
nineteenth century. I address the specific changes when analyzing
the passages under discussion. For the standardized version of
the story, see Ambrose Bierce, “The Haunted Valley,” The
Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, ed. and comp.
by Ernest Jerome Hopkins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1984); and Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose
Bierce,
vol. 3 (New York: Gordian, 1966). For letters written by Bierce
discussing the tedious process of editing and revising for the Collected
Works, see Samuel Loveman, ed., Twenty-One Letters of
Ambrose Bierce (Cleveland: George Kirk, 1922), 16, 17, 22,
27, 31; Bertha Clark Pope, The Letters of Ambrose Bierce,
with a memoir by George Sterling (San Francisco: Book Club of
California, 1922), 150, 151.

3. My
translation: "AH WEE—CHINAMAN. Age unknown. Worked
last for Whiskey Jo. This monument is erected by the same
to keep his memory green and likewise as a warning to Celestials
not to take on airs like Whites. Damn ‘em! She was
a good egg." Bierce updated and standardized this
passage for volume 3 of his Collected Works (1910).
In this later version, he made the slight changes that brought
the spelling on the epitaph closer to standard spelling: "AH
WEE—CHINAMAN. Age Unknown. Worked for Jo. Dunfer. This
monument is erected by him to keep the Chink’s memory green.
Likewise as a warning to Celestials not to take on airs. Devil
take ‘em! She Was a Good Egg." I prefer the original
version because we can see Bierce playing with local color, and,
more importantly, his insistence upon Dunfer being unschooled.
The reworking of the passage presents Dunfer as more educated—and
possibly more credible—than in Bierce’s original
representation of him.

4.My
translation: "I didn't pan out well in those days: I drank
more than was good for me, and I had no nice, discriminating
sense of my duty as a free, white citizen; so I got this pagan
[Chinese immigrant] as a kind of cook and turned off a Mexican
woman—as nice a Greaser [Mexican] as you ever saw. But,
when I got religion, over at the Hill, and they talked of running
me for the Legislature, my eyes were opened. But what was I do?
If I made him sling his kit and mosey [pack up his things and
leave], somebody else might take him [in], and might not treat
him well. What was I to do? What would any Christian do, especially
one new to the business [religion]?" In the standardized
version of this passage, Bierce excised the epithet "Greaser."
The revised text simply reads: " … so I took that
pagan in, as a kind of cook." By omitting the word Greaser,
Bierce changes the tenor of racial hostilities from whites in
California to be primarily anti-Chinese rather than directed
at all non-white populations as the original version suggests.

5. These
fears were not only related to religion and economics, but also to a rhetoric
and logic of scientific discourse that was gaining prominence. For the ways
in which these fears transferred and manifested into medical discourses, see
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001). For examples of George’s jeremiads,
see "What
the Railroads Will Bring Us," Overland Monthly 1.4 (1868): 297-306.

6. In
1854, San Francisco passed Ordinance No. 546, "To Suppress
Houses of Ill-Fame Within the City Limits," which selectively
targeted Mexican and Chinese brothels in its application. See
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women
in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 31; Sucheng Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women,
1870-1943," Entry
Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943,
ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991),
97. This was followed by an 1866 ordinance, "An Act for
the Suppression of Chinese Houses of Ill-Fame," Yung, Unbound
Feet,
32. This legislation, specifically targeting Chinese-American
women, was successful in containing them within a designated
area of the city. In 1870, the state passed a law that made
it illegal to bring any Chinese women into the state of California
without paperwork authenticating that they came willingly.
See Yung, Unbound Feet, 32; Chan, "Exclusion," 97.
This ordinance, "An Act to Prevent the Kidnapping and
Importation of Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese Females for
Criminal or Demoralizing Purposes," restricted the
entry of Chinese women into the state by requiring them to
undergo detailed and humiliating physical examinations. This
law effectively curtailed immigration from China and from the
rest of the U.S., since violations were determined at the discretion
of the officials. Eventually the California Supreme Court
struck down the law since it was in direct violation of the
Burlingame Treaty that the U.S. had signed with China in Washington,
D.C., in July 1868. The treaty, which was named after Anson
Burlingame, a political appointee of President Lincoln, declared
that both the U.S. and China would grant most-favorable-nation
status to the citizens of the other, authorizing unabridged
rights to travel, work, trade, and immigrate. The restrictive
laws in California, however, made clear the sentiments of the
politically powerful in the state. See Robert G. Lee, Orientals:
Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1999), 89; Benson Tong, Unsubmissive
Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 60; Yung, Unbound Feet,
33.

7. The
Federal 1875 Page Law forbade "the entry of Chinese,
Japanese, and 'Mongolian' contract laborers, [and]
women for the purpose of prostitution." See Chan, "Exclusion,"
105. This law effectively excluded all but elite Chinese women
and the wives of businessmen from entering the country. Working-class
women or women without male protection were considered prostitutes
or easy prey to prostitution, thus were refused entry. In 1879,
as anti-Chinese sentiment spilled over from Chinese women to
all Chinese Americans, Congress passed the Fifteen Passenger
Bill, which limited the number of Chinese passengers on any
ship coming to the U.S. to fifteen. See Andrew Gyory, Closing
the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 138. The final
restriction was the enactment of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion
Act, which limited the entry of both Chinese men and women
except for the elite few who qualified for exempt status as
merchants, scholars, diplomats, travelers, U.S. citizens and
their wives. As these laws indicate, the solidification of
class, gender, and racial formations that eventually coalesced
around white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian dominance
was not a naturalprogression of
a superior social group asserting its domination. Rather, it
was a hard-fought struggle won through the displacement
and disenfranchisement of and discrimination against numerous
other social, ethnic, racial, and economic groups.

8. The
epithet greaser has many negative connotations, which
all serve to collapse significant intraracial and interethnic
differences. As Shelley Streeby points out, the pejorative
term greaser flattened the social and class hierarchies
in California between the working classes and the elite Californios
as well as the differences of national origin among the native-born
Californians and immigrant Peruvians, Chileans, and Mexicans. See
Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and
the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002), 270. Judy Yung points out that
Latin-American women who worked in the sex trade were ignominiously
called greaseritas. See
Yung, Unbound Feet, 31.

9. The
understanding that Catholicism was idolatrous and dangerous
was widespread among Protestants in the nineteenth century.
Best-selling novels published in the late 1830s that sensationalized
the sufferings of young women at the hands of nuns and priests
were still widely circulating in the 1860s. See Nancy Lusignan
Schultz, Veil of Fear: Nineteenth-Century Convent Tales
by Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk (West Lafayette, Ind.:
NotaBell Books, 1999). While it is widely thought that anti-Catholicism
reached its apex in the early nineteenth century and was waning
by the mid-century, Philip Jenkins argues that anti-Catholicism
still held sway in the late-nineteenth century as a result
of the rise in nativism and labor politics. As he points out,
"for Protestants of the 1870s, Catholics were quite as aberrant
as the stereotypical Moonies or Hare Krishnas of a later age"
(29). See Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The
Last Acceptable Prejudice (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 28-29.

11. As
Lisa Lowe writes, "the history of racial formation of
Asian immigrants and Asian Americans has always included a
'class formation' and a 'gender formation,'" Lisa
Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 14.

12.For
discussions of male/male bonds in relation to homosociality and
homosexuality, see Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social
World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000);
Lee, Orientals; Michael Davidson, "The Lady from
Shanghai: California Orientalism and 'Guys Like Us,'" Western
American Literature 35.4 (Winter 2001): 347-371.